C
Carole
Guest
TO BE OR NOT TO BE? 150 Years of Hidden Knowledge
by Christopher Bird 1991
Nexus Magazine April 1992
http://www.whale.to/p/bird.html
(Wilhelm Reich, Royal Raymond Rife, Gaston Naessens, Antionne Bechamp and Guenther Enderlein)
THE MYSTERY OF PLEOMORPHIC MICROBIAL ORGANISMS
"At the heart of science lies discovery which involves a change in worldview. Discovery in science
is possible only in societies which accord their citizens the freedom to pursue the truth where it
may lead and which therefore have respect for different paths to that truth,"
-- John Polanyi, Canadian Nobel Laureate (Chemistry); commencement address, McGill University,
Montreal, Canada, June 1990
What follows is an attempt to provide a brief overview of astounding findings made by a band of
intrepid and heretical searchers in a field of knowledge that deals with the very smallest
forms of life.
Hard as it is to believe, these findings, made over more than a century ago, have been consistently
ignored, censored by silence, or suppressed throughout all of that time by ruling "opinion-makers",
orthodox (R1) thinkers in mainstream microbiology.
Instead of being welcomed with excitement and open arms, as one would a friend or lover, the amazing
discoveries have been received with a hostility unusually only meted out to trespassers or
impostors.
To try to present the vastness of a multi-dimensional panorama, is a little like trying to inscribe
the contents of thick manuscript onto a postage stamp, or reduce the production of an hour-long
drama into a few minutes of stage time. Involved on the one hand is not only the sheer volume of
material, but with books on the subject being hard to obtain, it is also not easily accessible and
is sparsely referenced in ordinary bibliographical sources.
On the other hand, the protagonists in what amounts to a gripping saga were, more often than not,
completely isolated from one another in space, time or both. They, and their parallel work and
research, were consequently often unknown to their potential colleagues and natural allies. It was
as if they were adventurers who, thinking themselves to be the sole explorers in virgin territory,
were actually all opening up various parts of the same terra incognita.
Furthermore, as we have already said, the reports of the discovery of a whole "New World" by these
many "Columbuses" were unwelcome, "Old World" cartographers had already made their maps and were
satisfied with them. Therefore, since maps of this territory are sketchy at best, or nonexistent at
worst, outsiders seeking to penetrate it should remember the Buddhist saying: "The only trails are
those that are made by walking" And the ones upon which they set foot will be not so much selected
by intention as stumbled upon by chance.
It is for such reasons that, when I thought about how I might approach this subject today, I decided
to eschew the formality of any academic approach in favour of telling the tale of my own foray into
the little known land of pleomorphic organisms as it actually unfolded. Unlike other speakers at
this symposium, I am neither a scientist, an academic or a health professional, but a writer who,
for some 20 years, has roved the "frontiers" of science. I am certain that if any of you have been
propelled by some similarly strange twist of fate to go on the same quest, you have taken a
different trail from nine.
Yet, as they say, "all roads finally lead to Rome."
FIRST STEPS ON THE TRAIL: WILHELM REICH AND THE BIONS My first exposure to the world of pleomorphic
organisms - though I did not recognise it at the time - came in 1969 when, after returning to the
United States from a stint as a foreign correspondent, I was asked by Peter Tompkins, an established
author, to help him research a biography on the life and work of a "maverick" scientist, the late
Wilhelm Reich M.D.
If "maverickness" is a quality attributable to innovators unafraid of developing new ideas and
inventions - and often unscorched by the brand of any formal education into the subjects of their
research - then that term suits Reich to a "T’.After first making his mark in psychoanalysis
as Freud’s protégé and leading collaborator, he abruptly broke with the International
Psychoanalytic Movement to take up an independent career in an aspect of what today has come to be
called biophysics.
When he bolted the Freudian "herd" in the mid-1930’s, most of his colleagues became his bitter
enemies.Exiled from central Europe to Norway, he began working with an unusual microscope equipped
with special lenses that could magnify living organisms to 2 - 3000X their normal size, well over
twice the magnification achievable with the ordinary microscopes of his day.
Among his extraordinary discoveries were "vesicles," minuscule fluid containing bladder-like sacs,
that appeared in infusions of hay and other substances such as animal tissue, earth and coal.
After much experimentation during which he noted a marked increase in the number of vesicles that
could be cultured when the preparations containing them were boiled, he concluded that the strange
forms he had discovered were "transitional" one lying midway between the realms of the animate and
the inert.
To these heretofore unrecognised elementary stages of life, he gave the name: Bions.(1)
Most microbiologists, not to speak of other life-scientists, undoubtedly looked upon Reich’s
new creatures as if they had come straight out of Walt Disney’s old film, Fantasia. If so,
they were in for an even ruder shock. For when Reich poured some of his boiled preparations onto
nutrient culture media, the cultures began to generate peculiar looking bacteria and amoebae,
creating, as it were, well-known life-forms, at least forms akin to them.There was, of course, the
possibility that the newly generated "animacules" - as Leuwenhock, inventor of the microscope called
them when he first viewed them - could have invaded the cultures from the ambient atmosphere or that
they could have appeared because the culture media had been improperly sterilized.
To rule these out, Reich superheated his bion cultures to find that the ostensibly "dead" mixtures
still gave rise to the higher microbic forms. This led to the further conclusion that bions, as
preliminary stages of life, were embodiments of an indestructible life force that defied death. This
life energy he called "Orgone."
So apparently outlandish a discovery as that of a new "life energy" could not but rile biologists
who had long sought to dispose of "vitalistic theories" such as those of the French philosopher,
Henri Bergson, who postulated an elan vital, or the German biologist, Hans Driesch, who, borrowing
the term from Aristotle, referred to entelechy. Biology was coming increasingly under the cold sway
of a physics which adamantly rejected any "mystical" notions such as those of a "primal creator" or
a "force of life", and therefore dutifully took its cue from the branch of science considered "first
among peers."
Were all his disclosures not already so heretical as to alarm orthodox, or "correct opinion-making"
science, to them Reich next added that microbial bion structures could also be detected in, and
cultured from human blood, which, then as now, was and is considered to be sterile, an unchanging
doctrine still taught in medical schools.
This, in turn, next led him to examine blood samples taken from persons suffering from cancer in
which he saw extremely tiny bacterial forms that he connected to that lethal disease process. He
therefore labelled them T - bacilli, the T standing for Tod which in Reich’s native German
means "death."It seemed to Reich that there was something unaccountable going on in the bodies of
the cancer-afflicted, a degeneration causing healthy life-promoting bions to develop into a death-
dealing T-bacilli.
Since he had also found these "death bacteria" in the excreta of healthy people, he assumed that
they were able to dispose of cancer causing particles, and that disposition to cancer was determined
by a level of biological resistance to putrefaction.
It is at this juncture that I shall ask a leading question that only came into my mind many years
after I had, via Reich, begun to delve into pleomorphic bacteriology and its connection with cancer
and other degenerative diseases. I ask it because I later found that researchers working in this
pioneering field who discovered microbes associated with cancerous states - to which each gave his
or her own special nomenclature, thus creating a kind of "Tower of Babel" - instead of looking upon
the appearance of the alien forms as an "alarm signs" or "warning light", that is an indicator of an
incipient disease state, held them to be the cause of the disease.
The question, a central one in this discussion, therefore is: "Could germs appearing in the body be
the result rather than the cause of afflictions, if not always, at least often?"
It may be that they are both.
Reich’s life ended tragically. For his pains, he was submitted anew to viciously virulent
attacks for questioning sacred dogmas of medical science in general and cancerology in particular.
The story of this towering, often cantankerous, scientist ended when he was brought to trial and
sentenced to a term in a U.S. Federal penitentiary where, in 1964, he died.
The government of our American free republic also ordered that all of Reich’s publication on
which they could lay their hands - including a privately printed journal, Journal of Orgonomy - be
destroyed in a New York City incinerator. That order was carried out less than 20 years after the
Nazi government in Germany had ordered all of Reich’s then existing publications burned on an
enormous pyre in downtown Berlin.(R3)
Second steps on the trail: Royal Raymond Rife and the "Universal" microscope For many reasons, our
biography was never written (R4). Yet the two years spent researching it was hardly wasted, because
it was through the opportunity given to delve into Reich’s fascinating research that I first
fell, like Alice down the hole or through the looking glass, into a wonderland of scientific "no-
no’s."In many ways it was a thrilling, yet troubling experience.
Disturbing because, as one long trained to accept things as they supposedly "were", I was
brought face to face with an investigative world in which those same things actually "were not".
As I went along my trail, I also found that there were many other "were note" and "are nots"
that were and are!
One question was especially rankling: What was preventing new discoveries from being recognised for
what they were? Was this because "established" researchers, comfortable with orthodox scientific
thinking, or "received knowledge", could not change their mini-sets, in Dr. John Polanyi’s
words, their "worldview" to accommodate innovative thinking, or "vanguard knowledge?"How was it
that, in the precincts ruled by the "arbiters of knowledge", the evidencing of "unknown" things,
instead of being viewed with excitement, was often castigated as "illusory" or tabooed as "fantasy"?
In 1965, I came across an article that more than just attracted my writer’s attention in that,
in 1944, it was published in, not just one, but two prestigious journals, that of the Smithsonian
Institute in Washington, D.C. and that of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
One third of its contents was devoted to the new electron microscope just put on the market by the
Radio Corporation of America, the other two thirds, the lion’s share, to a "Universal
Microscope" that had been designed and developed in the 1920’s by a Californian autodidact,
Royal Raymond Rife.The electron microscope, I knew, while capable of attaining magnifications
surpassing 500,000X at excellent resolution, was incapable of examining living things because its
radiation killed them.
But, as clearly stated in the article, Rife’s instrument was able to view living matter at
unheard of magnifications reaching at least 60,000X, also at excellent resolution (R5).With this
extraordinary device, Rife could easily view a family of microbes in the blood of sick people which
seemingly miraculously transformed, under various conditions, one into the other, like so many
caterpillars metamorphosing into so many butterflies. Sixteen stages in all, the same number in
Gaston Naessens’ somatid cycle.
As a result, he came to the independent conclusion - to which as we shall see, others had come
independently both before and after him - that, depending on its inner state, germs arose within the
body itself that, in Rife’s opinion, were not the cause but the result of disease states.That
single conclusion completely overturned everything d I had learned about bacteriology and disease
during a four year course at general biology at Harvard.
Barely able to believe what I had read, and recalling what I had learned during my studies of
Reich’s bion research, I dropped a book (R6) I was working on to spend two months at the
National Library of Medicine trying to track down everything I could on Rife and his superscope. Not
only was there precious little printed on the subject but the microscope itself seemed to have
vanished from the surface of the earth.
The story of my fruitless search has been told elsewhere (3), so here, I will simply say that my
library research showed that for several decades up to 1930, a now all but forgotten, if not
entirely lost, school of microbiologists had maintained that, far from holding everlastingly to one
shape, bacteria could be caused, under the right conditions of culture, to metamorphose into forms
small enough to pass through filters capable of blocking any microbe smaller than a virus.
Because of their sharp disagreement with a camp of orthodox bacteriologists known as non-
filtrationists", these rebels were known as "filtrationists". One of the earliest members of this
school was a Swedish Ernst Bernhard Almquist, who, because he was also an Arctic explorer had
islands off the north Siberian coast named after him.
Almquist made hundreds of observations of pleomorphic bacteria in his laboratory as did researchers
in France, Italy, Germany, Russia and the United States and probably other countries. In 1922, after
two long decades of work, Almquist came to the conclusion that "nobody can presume to know the
complete life cycle and all the varieties of even a single bacterial species. It would be an
assumption to think so."
A furore was unleashed in the microbiological world by microscopic discoveries as well as by his
subsequent electromagnetically-based cure for cancer and other diseases, and he was put, like Reich,
to trial by U.S. medical authorities. The trial proved so traumatic to the highly sensitive inventor
that it led first to a total nervous breakdown, then to alcoholism (R7).
The opposite fates of two microscopes, the electron and the "Universal", have ever since continued
to plague my mind, incessantly pricking it with a philosophical question: How was it that the first,
able to see only inert, inanimate matter was universally adopted in the world’s laboratories
while the second, able to view animate organism as they lived and breathed, went into universal
limbo?What did the triumphant success of the one, and the sad demise of the other, have to say about
the basic 20th century outlook in the biosciences supposedly dealing with life?
While asking that question, let us add a few more. What is it about the "politics of science" that
led two scientific titans - or three, if, by anticipation, we include our host, Gaston Naessens -
men who were self-trained experts in microscopy, and cancerology, to be brought to trial? How is it
that the discoveries of all three have been put on an "Index" as bogus and worthless? What explains
their being denounced, all three of them, as deceivers and charlatans in the United States, France
and many other countries? It would take a moment of silence to contemplate the answer to these
questions." (R8)
THIRD STEPS ON THE TRAIL: GASTON NAESSENS AND THE SOMATID From where it had first led to Reich,
thence to Rife, my trail next took me, surprisingly enough, to Rock Forest, a small village in that
portion of Quebec, just north of Vermont, that is called L’Estrie in French, and The Eastern
Townships in English.
I was tipped off to the existence of Gaston Naessens by Eva Reich
M.D., Wilhelm Reich’s daughter. Since part of the story of my initial meeting, and 12-year
association, with him has been told in the first chapter of my book, I shall not repeat it
here.What I can and should say, is that if my studies of Reich’s research had opened a
narrow vista onto the world of pleomorphic microbiology, and those of Reich’s work had
greatly widened it, then what I came to learn as result of my encounters with Naessens began to
afford me a view of the whole horizon beyond it.
My first visit to see Gaston Naessens was in 1979, ten years after a footlocker of Reich’s
writings had been handed to me by Peter Tompkins for study. During the next half decade I was to
learn, through my own experience, the help of friends and particularly through hundreds of hours
spent with Gaston Naessens and his wife, a great deal more about what he has discovered in his
fascinating research life than is reported in my book. And to learn about the many vicissitudes he
has gone through as a result.
As time went by, one of the main things that became most shockingly clear to me was the
unwillingness, or the inability of many scientifically trained people to accept or believe what they
were seeing through Naessens’ microscope.Instead of heralding the somatidic forms as
excitingly brand new, they simply wrote them off as artifact, something not naturally present but
introduced in error."
(R9).
A whole essay could be written about how such beliefs spring, within seconds, into the minds of so
called "competent" observers the most authoritarian of whom pass along as "certainties" to their
followers. All such observers - and they are the vast majority - have, if they have ever heard it,
forgotten Reich’s dictum for scientific work: "Do not automatically believe in anything ,
especially what you are told. Convince yourself of something by observing it with your own eyes.
And, after having perceived a new fact, do not loose site of it again until it is fully explained"
(emphasis added)If in this connection, it appears that the aphorism "seeing is believing" does not
necessarily hold true, one may add that the same is the case for the reverse: "believing is seeing".
During one trip to Europe with the Naessens’ in the mid 1980s, we were privileged to meet a
Swedish physician, Erik Enby MD. who had experience working with what I learned was one of the
earliest, and most talented, pioneers in the field of pleomorphic microbial research.This was a
German zoologist of whom we shall say more of in a few moments.
It was because of the language barrier - Enby’s spoken English was halting and
Enderlein’s publications were in German, a language I neither speak nor read - that I could
not subsequently penetrate that part of the terra incognita where the German scientist had laboured,
at least not until 1990.
The peaks in a mountain chain of discoveries made by Naessens have been reviewed in part one of my
book. In retrospect, given the whole "patchwork quilt" or other discoveries in this field made by a
small platoon of researches, I would say that his crowning find was to have traced the whole cycle
back to its origin, the tiny form he calls the somatid and to show how that form not only is all but
indestructible, but through experimentation, how it acts something like a "DNA precursor" (R10).
All this and more, raises the question as to whether Naessens, in addition to everything else he has
done, including the development of a promising approach for the alleviation of degenerative disease,
has not come as close as anyone to unravelling the skein within which lies hidden the very mystery
of the origins of life that has for so long continued to confound science, as it still continues to
confound it. I use the qualification "as close as" because the next twist in my trail was to
confront me with the realization that another French scientist of rare genius might have been
unravelling the same skein a century before Naessens began to take up the task
FOURTH STEPS ON THE TRAIL: BECHAMP AND THE MICROZYMAS It was in France, in 1984, that I met a
pharmacist, Marie Nonclerq, who after a life spent practising her profession, was spurred to write
an award winning doctoral dissertation under the title: Antoine Bichamp, 1816-1908: The Man and the
Scientist, and the Originality and Productivity of his Work’ (4).The disappearance of
Rife’s microscope, along with most of his research documentation, constituted what amounted to
a lost chapter in the history of microbiological science.
What Nonclercq had been able to dredge up from the annals seemed to be no less than a whole
lost book.
I had stumbled, again by happenstance, on a controversy involving a battle between two scientific
titans that had for so long been swept from memory that several generation of scientists knew
nothing about it. One of the adversaries was Béchamp, the other, his nemesis, the world-famous Louis
Pasteur whose name is inscribed on the lintels of research institutes all over the world. The
controversy centrally involved their opposing views about the genesis of microbe-fostered disease.
Through a physician in Brittany, Nonclercq came across a thick tome on the history of a medicine (5)
in which she read that, on his death bed, Louis Pasteur had declared: Claude Bernard war right...
the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything."
In his recantation, the father of the theory - still enshrined as gospel - that the primordial role
in many diseases is played by germs invading the body from without, seemed to be submitting to
evidence that, in actual fact, that role is often played by the body’s internal environment,
its terrain, its "soil" if one wills, that, changing in nature due to various causes, fosters the
development of germs from within.What Pasteur omitted was that his confession had been based not on
single insightful statement by France’s leading physiologist, Bernard, but by Antoine Béchamp,
the man with whom he had been locked in struggle for decades.
Nonclercq’s painstaking digging into historical sources uncontestably proves that this battle
was won, not on the basis of scientific facts, but by Pasteur’s being able to overcome his
nemesis, a dedicated, but retiring, searcher with no flair for self-promotion, with his highly
developed skills in what today is called "public relations."If the justice of history prevails, the
Pasteurian victory will one day prove entirely pyrrhic, at least in terms of the staggering losses
suffered by medical science in having, for so long been constrained to follow the Pasteurian track.
Béchamp’s own trail of discoveries began when, attacking the problem of fermentation -
chemical reactions that split complex compounds into relatively simple substances - he isolated from
living organisms a series of "ferments" he called zymases (R11).Working with a class of organisms
called molds, fungoid growths that disintegrate organic matter, Béchamp saw them to be formed by a
collection of tiny "granulations" which, because of their connection to zymases, he called
microzymas, or "tiny ferments", lexical forerunner of Naessens’ somatids ("tiny bodies") (6).
Very importantly, for the purposes of this narrative, he also found that these granulations, under
certain conditions, evolved into single-celled bacteria and that, therefore "cells could no longer
be regarded as the basic units of life", there being something far smaller to replace them.
More than that, the microzymas were seemingly so indestructible that Béchamp could find them even in
limestone dating to a geologic period going back 60 million years during which the first mammals
appeared on Earth. And he was astonished that all his efforts to kill them proved fruitless. As he
was to write in his third masterwork, The Blood, "I am able to assert that the microzyma is at the
commencement of all organisation.
And, since microzymas in dead bacteria are also living, it follows that they are also the living end
of all organisations, living beings of a special category without analogue."(7).
Because microzymas appeared at the inception of the life process - for instance in an ovule that
became an egg - and were also to be found, fully active, in decaying life-forms, Béchamp, in a
biological parallel to Lavoisier’s chemical rule: "Nothing is lost, nothing is created ... all
is transformed," was to state: "Nothing is the prey of death.. all is the prey of life."This seems
to recall the old biblical phrase: "Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust..." On the final page of The
Blood, Béchamp was even more explicit:
"After death, it is essential that matter be restored to its primitive condition, for it has only
been lent for a time to the living organised being ... Living beings, filled with microzymas, carry
in themselves the elements essential for life, or for disease, for destruction and for death."
This variety of results need not surprise us for the processes are the same. Our cells - as can
constantly be observed - are being continuously destroyed by means of a fermentation very
analogous to that which follows death. If we penetrate into the heart of these phenomena we could
really say, were it not that the expression is a trifle offensive, that we are constantly
rotting!" (emphasis added).
FIFTH STEPS ON THE TRAIL: GUENTHER ENDERLEIN AND THE BACTERIAL LIFE CYCLE It was only in the 1990
that, a year after our sequel (R12) to The Secret Life of Plants came out, and 22 years after I
began studying Reich and the bions, I finally had access to the work of another researcher that made
the chain of mountain peaks on the horizon of pleomorphic microbial research stand out in clearer
historical detail. This access was provided by a book, the first in English on the subject, dealing
with the research begun during World War I by German zoologist, Guenther Enderlein, whose
discoveries were characterised by the book’s author as "some of the most important ever
made."Working as a bacteriologist in a military hospital on the Baltic Sea, Enderlein, in 1917,
finished a manuscript heralded by colleagues as "opening totally new observations of the microbe
world." It revealed many different pleomorphic development phases of bacteria and showed that
illnesses and their healing processes are bound to exact cyclical and morphological laws.
The manuscript was published as a book, Bakterien Cyclogenie, (The Life Cycle of Bacteria) in 1925,
shortly after its author’s appointment as curator of the Zoological Museum in Berlin.
For inspiring his work, Enderlein gives great credit to Antoine Béchamp as well as several Germans
who took up where Béchamp left off, including zoologist Robert Leuckart, founder of the science of
parisitology, and Otto Schmidt, who first reported parasites in the blood of cancer patients as far
back as 1901.
Given the focus of interest at this meeting on darkfield microscopy, it is of great interest to add
here that only by working at this instrument did Enderlein learn that micro-organisms go through a
forming-changing cycle that, in his view, could take on countless variations leading him to label
the phenomenon a "1000-headed monster."
He unequivocally asserted, while different types of micro-organisms normally live within the body in
a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship, with severe deterioration of the body’s
environment they develop into disease-producing (!!) forms to create what he called dysbiosis, or "a
fault in the life process."Their action, said Enderlein, was not due to any perverse intent on the
microbes part to harm it, but to the their urge to survive at its expense! In their early
development phases they lived in the blood to perform functions beneficial to health, in the later
ones, they abandoned that role to assure their preservation.’
Since, today, Bakterien Cyclogenie has become virtually unknown, it is curious to note that, before
World War II, it brought the researcher a modicum of international recognition. It was apparently
well received at an international biological congress held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1930, and
Enderlein’s contributions were recognised by his being honoured, in 1939, at the Third
Microbiological Congress held in New York City.
Despite personal attacks on him by powerful members of the orthodox German medical community,
Enderlein was strongly supported by a few courageous colleagues such as the physician and microbial
researcher,
Dr. Wilhelm von Brehmer, who identified as causal agent in the uncontrolled and malignant growth of
Cancerous cells."
Enby’s book also filled me in on historical aspects of how the doctrine that microbes were
monomorphic - as opposed to pleomorphic - had risen to ascendancy, aspects which I had missed while
researching my paper on Royal Raymond Rife.This rise can be attributed not only to the influence of
Pasteur (1822-1895), but also to that of Robert Koch (1843-1910), whose "principles" are one of the
"Ten Commandments" in microbial research, and his compatriot the naturalist and botanist, Ferdinand
Julius Cohn (1828-1898), who insisted upon the constancy of bacterial types and their Classification
into rigidly set groups and species based on their structure and form.
Entrenched as dogma, the Cohn-Koch view was taught to many Americans who went to Germany to study
medicine after the turn of the Century and who, in turn, brought it back to the United Stales where,
becoming the ruling outlook, it brooked no opposition.
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION: THE TRAIL WINDS AHEAD What I have presented to you is only an account of a
personal trek into the mysterious country inhabited by pleomorphic organisms. I gave it to you
"piecemeal" so that you could share the uncertainties and surprises met along the trail that are
normal to any exploration.
The country surveyed has been only superficially charted but, as a result of my exploration, my
knapsack is filled with a heap of sketches, that, given the time necessary to accomplish the task,
would one day allow me to prepare a map of the territory in all detail.
In book form, this map could easily provide a tale as exciting as any told in the best detective
thriller. All that is lacking is its ending, and the ending "devoutly to be wished" is that the
labours of so many stalwart workers in the field of microbial pleomorphic research will find their
fruits in the acceptance of their findings - and the applications of therapeutic modalities to which
these have led
- for the benefit of the sick and the suffering everywhere.
The first chapter of Dr. Enby’s book was entitled; "Origins of a Medical Revolution." That
revolution, still in progress is not over. Since Enderlein’s book came out 65 years ago, its
conclusions, like those of Béchamp before him, have continued to remain unacknowledged by the
scientific community as a whole. This is not because many other researchers have not bent every
effort to bring out the truth, to make the revolution happen. Consider, for instance that, way back
in 1927, an American microbiologist, Dr. Philip Hadley, who much admired Enderlein’s work,
published, in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, a 312 page article, "Microbic Dissociation", based
on work conducted at the Hygienic Laboratory of the University of Michigan. In this article, Hadley
foresightedly noted:
"It will probably be many years before a true appraisal of Enderlein’s contribution can be
made. In the meantime, we may regard with not little admiration his manifestly careful attempt to
put a degree of order into the chaotic state of the study of bacterial cells.
I believe that Enderlein has blazed a trail which, at least, in many lines of advance, other
bacteriologists sooner or later are sure to follow."Those words were written 64 years ago, but few
have been the bacteriologists to take up Hadley’s challenge.One who did take up that challenge
was born only three years before Hadley laid it down. We are in his presence today. In a life of
devotion and, isolation, half of it in his native France, the other half in Quebec, the land of his
adoption, he has kept alight, and borne forward, the torch lit and carried before him by Béchamp,
Enderlein, Rife, Reich and so many others.
Now he has emerged from cherished anonymity into the limelight at a symposium of his summoning to
which you have come, many of you from far away, to bear what he has to say and to see what he has to
show you. It maybe that his discoveries will determine whether the field of microbial pleomorphic
research will at last emerge onto scientific center-stage. Will that emergence soon happen"?
Is it "to be or not to be?" For that, as Hamlet put it in another context, is the question.
Let us salute Gaston Naessens and his triumphant accomplishments.
REFERENCES: RI The word ‘orthodox’, stems from Greek ortho . (meaning
‘correct’, or ‘right’, or even ‘upright’) mid doxa
(‘opinion), the latter coming from the verb, dokein (‘to think,’ or ‘to
seem’). Traced to its roots, orthodoxy thus connotes ‘opinions that seem, or are though
to be correct’
R2 Untranslatable into any other language, the word ‘maverick’ denotes one who refuses
to abide by the dictates of his group, in other words, a’dissenter’. Most people do not
know that its etymology comes straight out of the cowboy culture of the ‘Old West’ where
the term was applied to an unbranded, or orphan, range calf or foal traditionally considered the
property of the first person who brands it. The English speaking word is indebted to an early Texas
cattleman, Samuel a Maverick (1809-1810) who did not brand his calves, for involuntarily donating
his name to its lexicon.
R3 The world, and perhaps the only, expert on Reich’s bion research is Dr. Bernard Grad,
professor of biological sciences recently retired from McGill University in Montreal. In his student
days, Grad spent much time working with Reich at "Organon" the home and research laboratory Reich
bult in Rangeley, Maine. Grad has research, still awaiting publication, on his own bion research as
it relates to the origin of Life.
R4 Reich’s private archives were sealed by the sole trustee to his estate. His daughter, Eva,
tried unsuccessfully to unseal them through court action.
R5 Rife’s genius also invented a camera which could clearly reveal the letters and numbers of
an auto license plate from a mile away!
R6 The Diving Hand: The 500 Year Old Mystery of Dowsing (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1979; New Age
Publications, North Carolina, 1985.)
R7 It was only through a fortuitous meeting in Kansas City that I was finally led to the San Diego
garage of one of Rife’s lab assistants where I found the "Universal Microscope" in dilapidated
condition. The publication of my article resulted in many phone calls from people who had been on
the hunt for the microscope for years. One of the most interesting and ardent came from John Hubbard
MD., State University of New York (Buffalo), who came to my house in Washington
M.E. to look at documentation on Rife I had brought back from California. I had planned to write a
book on Rife’s life and work, but other projects intervened. That book, The Cancer Cure
that Worked, (Marcus Books, Queensville, Ontario, 1987) was written by Barry Lynes.
R8 For enlightening answers to these questions, see The Cancer Industry Unravelling the Politics, by
Ralph W.Moss (Paragon House, New York, 1989).
R9 The word "artifact" stems from art, plus factum (the neuter past participle of the verb facere,
"to make"), or "something made". In biology, it means "a structure or substance not normally present
but produced by some external agency or action." Most of us have forgotten that the basic meaning of
the word, art, is "human effort to supplement, imitate, alter or counterfeit the work of nature."
The facile use of the word, "artifact," in addition to being able unjustly to dispose of new
microscopic discoveries, has a kind of "overtone" suggesting an attempt to trick, feign, dissemble
or to carry out a deception or engage in a fraudulent action. It fits well with accusations against
Naessens of having done all those things over the yeas.
R10 His experiments on rabbit-to-rabbit somatid transfer as they apply to genetic characteristic
change in living animals, and particularly to organ transplant with potentially no "rejection
syndrome", are described in part 1 of my book.
R11 Enzyme complexes found in yeasts, bacteria and higher plants. Credit for their discovery went,
not to Bechamp, but to a German scientist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1907 for making it.
Béchamp’s conclusive paper, justifying his priority, was published in 1897 and the word zymase
is found in the 1873 edition of the French Littre dictionary in connection with Bechamp’s
first work on the subject.R12 Secrets of the Soil, Harpercollins, New York, 1980.
1. Reich’s first book on this, written in German, was Die Bione (The Bions) published in
Norway in 1939. English language treatment of the subject is to be found in The Cancer Biopathy,
(first published in the 1950’s) 1973; and The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life,
1979, both published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
2. "The New Microscopes"
3. "What Has Become of the Rife Microscope?" New Age Journal, Boston, Massachusetts, 197(r, also
reprinted in The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naesens, NJ. Kramer inc,Tiburon, California,
1991, as Appendix "A".
4. Published as a book: Antoine Bechamp, 1816-1908 L’Homme et le Savant, Originalite et
Fecondite de Son Oeuvre, Maloine, Paris, 1982.
5. Delhoume, Leon, De Claude Bernard a d’Arsonval. Lib Bailliere et fils, Paris, 1939, 595pp~
6. Béchamp’s two master works on this subject seer Les Microzymas, Blilliere, Paris, 1883,
992pages; and Microzymas et Microbes, Editions Dentu, Paris, 1893, 346 pages.
7. From Le Sang et son deme element anatomique, Paris 1899, translated as The Blood and the Third
Anatomical Element by Montague R. Leverson MD., John Ouseley Limited, London 1912. In the
1980’s Alan Cantwell, M.D. reported that the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. had
informed him that the book was to be found neither in its collection nor in any library in the
United States. It has since been reprinted by Veritas Press, GPO Box 1653, Bundaberg, QId 1988.
8. Hidden Killers: The Revolutionary Medical Discoveries of Professor Gunther Enderlein, by Erik
Enby MD., Sheehan Communications, 1990. The book may be obtained from raum&zeit, Box 1508, Mount
Vernon, Washington D.C. 98273; Pb: 2064246025.
9. Enderlein who like Bechamp, lived for 96 years (he died in 1968), published many of his
conclusions in Akmon – a journal he first issued in 1955.
10. In his book, Siphonospora polymorpha von Brehmer 1947, this researcher also noted that cancer
can be prediagnosed in its earliest forms by measuring the pH value of the blood and the
appearance in it of large amounts of rod-shaped siphonospora, as viewable under a dark-field
microscope.
raum&zeit, VoLZ No.6,1991. Pages 52 to 59. (raum&zelt is an excellent bi-monthly journal published
in the USA. Subscriptions are US$75- for six issues: Dept. S.O.,PO Box 1508, Mount Vernon,
Washington 98273.
(11)424 6034 - Editor’s Office
by Christopher Bird 1991
Nexus Magazine April 1992
http://www.whale.to/p/bird.html
(Wilhelm Reich, Royal Raymond Rife, Gaston Naessens, Antionne Bechamp and Guenther Enderlein)
THE MYSTERY OF PLEOMORPHIC MICROBIAL ORGANISMS
"At the heart of science lies discovery which involves a change in worldview. Discovery in science
is possible only in societies which accord their citizens the freedom to pursue the truth where it
may lead and which therefore have respect for different paths to that truth,"
-- John Polanyi, Canadian Nobel Laureate (Chemistry); commencement address, McGill University,
Montreal, Canada, June 1990
What follows is an attempt to provide a brief overview of astounding findings made by a band of
intrepid and heretical searchers in a field of knowledge that deals with the very smallest
forms of life.
Hard as it is to believe, these findings, made over more than a century ago, have been consistently
ignored, censored by silence, or suppressed throughout all of that time by ruling "opinion-makers",
orthodox (R1) thinkers in mainstream microbiology.
Instead of being welcomed with excitement and open arms, as one would a friend or lover, the amazing
discoveries have been received with a hostility unusually only meted out to trespassers or
impostors.
To try to present the vastness of a multi-dimensional panorama, is a little like trying to inscribe
the contents of thick manuscript onto a postage stamp, or reduce the production of an hour-long
drama into a few minutes of stage time. Involved on the one hand is not only the sheer volume of
material, but with books on the subject being hard to obtain, it is also not easily accessible and
is sparsely referenced in ordinary bibliographical sources.
On the other hand, the protagonists in what amounts to a gripping saga were, more often than not,
completely isolated from one another in space, time or both. They, and their parallel work and
research, were consequently often unknown to their potential colleagues and natural allies. It was
as if they were adventurers who, thinking themselves to be the sole explorers in virgin territory,
were actually all opening up various parts of the same terra incognita.
Furthermore, as we have already said, the reports of the discovery of a whole "New World" by these
many "Columbuses" were unwelcome, "Old World" cartographers had already made their maps and were
satisfied with them. Therefore, since maps of this territory are sketchy at best, or nonexistent at
worst, outsiders seeking to penetrate it should remember the Buddhist saying: "The only trails are
those that are made by walking" And the ones upon which they set foot will be not so much selected
by intention as stumbled upon by chance.
It is for such reasons that, when I thought about how I might approach this subject today, I decided
to eschew the formality of any academic approach in favour of telling the tale of my own foray into
the little known land of pleomorphic organisms as it actually unfolded. Unlike other speakers at
this symposium, I am neither a scientist, an academic or a health professional, but a writer who,
for some 20 years, has roved the "frontiers" of science. I am certain that if any of you have been
propelled by some similarly strange twist of fate to go on the same quest, you have taken a
different trail from nine.
Yet, as they say, "all roads finally lead to Rome."
FIRST STEPS ON THE TRAIL: WILHELM REICH AND THE BIONS My first exposure to the world of pleomorphic
organisms - though I did not recognise it at the time - came in 1969 when, after returning to the
United States from a stint as a foreign correspondent, I was asked by Peter Tompkins, an established
author, to help him research a biography on the life and work of a "maverick" scientist, the late
Wilhelm Reich M.D.
If "maverickness" is a quality attributable to innovators unafraid of developing new ideas and
inventions - and often unscorched by the brand of any formal education into the subjects of their
research - then that term suits Reich to a "T’.After first making his mark in psychoanalysis
as Freud’s protégé and leading collaborator, he abruptly broke with the International
Psychoanalytic Movement to take up an independent career in an aspect of what today has come to be
called biophysics.
When he bolted the Freudian "herd" in the mid-1930’s, most of his colleagues became his bitter
enemies.Exiled from central Europe to Norway, he began working with an unusual microscope equipped
with special lenses that could magnify living organisms to 2 - 3000X their normal size, well over
twice the magnification achievable with the ordinary microscopes of his day.
Among his extraordinary discoveries were "vesicles," minuscule fluid containing bladder-like sacs,
that appeared in infusions of hay and other substances such as animal tissue, earth and coal.
After much experimentation during which he noted a marked increase in the number of vesicles that
could be cultured when the preparations containing them were boiled, he concluded that the strange
forms he had discovered were "transitional" one lying midway between the realms of the animate and
the inert.
To these heretofore unrecognised elementary stages of life, he gave the name: Bions.(1)
Most microbiologists, not to speak of other life-scientists, undoubtedly looked upon Reich’s
new creatures as if they had come straight out of Walt Disney’s old film, Fantasia. If so,
they were in for an even ruder shock. For when Reich poured some of his boiled preparations onto
nutrient culture media, the cultures began to generate peculiar looking bacteria and amoebae,
creating, as it were, well-known life-forms, at least forms akin to them.There was, of course, the
possibility that the newly generated "animacules" - as Leuwenhock, inventor of the microscope called
them when he first viewed them - could have invaded the cultures from the ambient atmosphere or that
they could have appeared because the culture media had been improperly sterilized.
To rule these out, Reich superheated his bion cultures to find that the ostensibly "dead" mixtures
still gave rise to the higher microbic forms. This led to the further conclusion that bions, as
preliminary stages of life, were embodiments of an indestructible life force that defied death. This
life energy he called "Orgone."
So apparently outlandish a discovery as that of a new "life energy" could not but rile biologists
who had long sought to dispose of "vitalistic theories" such as those of the French philosopher,
Henri Bergson, who postulated an elan vital, or the German biologist, Hans Driesch, who, borrowing
the term from Aristotle, referred to entelechy. Biology was coming increasingly under the cold sway
of a physics which adamantly rejected any "mystical" notions such as those of a "primal creator" or
a "force of life", and therefore dutifully took its cue from the branch of science considered "first
among peers."
Were all his disclosures not already so heretical as to alarm orthodox, or "correct opinion-making"
science, to them Reich next added that microbial bion structures could also be detected in, and
cultured from human blood, which, then as now, was and is considered to be sterile, an unchanging
doctrine still taught in medical schools.
This, in turn, next led him to examine blood samples taken from persons suffering from cancer in
which he saw extremely tiny bacterial forms that he connected to that lethal disease process. He
therefore labelled them T - bacilli, the T standing for Tod which in Reich’s native German
means "death."It seemed to Reich that there was something unaccountable going on in the bodies of
the cancer-afflicted, a degeneration causing healthy life-promoting bions to develop into a death-
dealing T-bacilli.
Since he had also found these "death bacteria" in the excreta of healthy people, he assumed that
they were able to dispose of cancer causing particles, and that disposition to cancer was determined
by a level of biological resistance to putrefaction.
It is at this juncture that I shall ask a leading question that only came into my mind many years
after I had, via Reich, begun to delve into pleomorphic bacteriology and its connection with cancer
and other degenerative diseases. I ask it because I later found that researchers working in this
pioneering field who discovered microbes associated with cancerous states - to which each gave his
or her own special nomenclature, thus creating a kind of "Tower of Babel" - instead of looking upon
the appearance of the alien forms as an "alarm signs" or "warning light", that is an indicator of an
incipient disease state, held them to be the cause of the disease.
The question, a central one in this discussion, therefore is: "Could germs appearing in the body be
the result rather than the cause of afflictions, if not always, at least often?"
It may be that they are both.
Reich’s life ended tragically. For his pains, he was submitted anew to viciously virulent
attacks for questioning sacred dogmas of medical science in general and cancerology in particular.
The story of this towering, often cantankerous, scientist ended when he was brought to trial and
sentenced to a term in a U.S. Federal penitentiary where, in 1964, he died.
The government of our American free republic also ordered that all of Reich’s publication on
which they could lay their hands - including a privately printed journal, Journal of Orgonomy - be
destroyed in a New York City incinerator. That order was carried out less than 20 years after the
Nazi government in Germany had ordered all of Reich’s then existing publications burned on an
enormous pyre in downtown Berlin.(R3)
Second steps on the trail: Royal Raymond Rife and the "Universal" microscope For many reasons, our
biography was never written (R4). Yet the two years spent researching it was hardly wasted, because
it was through the opportunity given to delve into Reich’s fascinating research that I first
fell, like Alice down the hole or through the looking glass, into a wonderland of scientific "no-
no’s."In many ways it was a thrilling, yet troubling experience.
Disturbing because, as one long trained to accept things as they supposedly "were", I was
brought face to face with an investigative world in which those same things actually "were not".
As I went along my trail, I also found that there were many other "were note" and "are nots"
that were and are!
One question was especially rankling: What was preventing new discoveries from being recognised for
what they were? Was this because "established" researchers, comfortable with orthodox scientific
thinking, or "received knowledge", could not change their mini-sets, in Dr. John Polanyi’s
words, their "worldview" to accommodate innovative thinking, or "vanguard knowledge?"How was it
that, in the precincts ruled by the "arbiters of knowledge", the evidencing of "unknown" things,
instead of being viewed with excitement, was often castigated as "illusory" or tabooed as "fantasy"?
In 1965, I came across an article that more than just attracted my writer’s attention in that,
in 1944, it was published in, not just one, but two prestigious journals, that of the Smithsonian
Institute in Washington, D.C. and that of the Franklin Institute in Philadelphia.
One third of its contents was devoted to the new electron microscope just put on the market by the
Radio Corporation of America, the other two thirds, the lion’s share, to a "Universal
Microscope" that had been designed and developed in the 1920’s by a Californian autodidact,
Royal Raymond Rife.The electron microscope, I knew, while capable of attaining magnifications
surpassing 500,000X at excellent resolution, was incapable of examining living things because its
radiation killed them.
But, as clearly stated in the article, Rife’s instrument was able to view living matter at
unheard of magnifications reaching at least 60,000X, also at excellent resolution (R5).With this
extraordinary device, Rife could easily view a family of microbes in the blood of sick people which
seemingly miraculously transformed, under various conditions, one into the other, like so many
caterpillars metamorphosing into so many butterflies. Sixteen stages in all, the same number in
Gaston Naessens’ somatid cycle.
As a result, he came to the independent conclusion - to which as we shall see, others had come
independently both before and after him - that, depending on its inner state, germs arose within the
body itself that, in Rife’s opinion, were not the cause but the result of disease states.That
single conclusion completely overturned everything d I had learned about bacteriology and disease
during a four year course at general biology at Harvard.
Barely able to believe what I had read, and recalling what I had learned during my studies of
Reich’s bion research, I dropped a book (R6) I was working on to spend two months at the
National Library of Medicine trying to track down everything I could on Rife and his superscope. Not
only was there precious little printed on the subject but the microscope itself seemed to have
vanished from the surface of the earth.
The story of my fruitless search has been told elsewhere (3), so here, I will simply say that my
library research showed that for several decades up to 1930, a now all but forgotten, if not
entirely lost, school of microbiologists had maintained that, far from holding everlastingly to one
shape, bacteria could be caused, under the right conditions of culture, to metamorphose into forms
small enough to pass through filters capable of blocking any microbe smaller than a virus.
Because of their sharp disagreement with a camp of orthodox bacteriologists known as non-
filtrationists", these rebels were known as "filtrationists". One of the earliest members of this
school was a Swedish Ernst Bernhard Almquist, who, because he was also an Arctic explorer had
islands off the north Siberian coast named after him.
Almquist made hundreds of observations of pleomorphic bacteria in his laboratory as did researchers
in France, Italy, Germany, Russia and the United States and probably other countries. In 1922, after
two long decades of work, Almquist came to the conclusion that "nobody can presume to know the
complete life cycle and all the varieties of even a single bacterial species. It would be an
assumption to think so."
A furore was unleashed in the microbiological world by microscopic discoveries as well as by his
subsequent electromagnetically-based cure for cancer and other diseases, and he was put, like Reich,
to trial by U.S. medical authorities. The trial proved so traumatic to the highly sensitive inventor
that it led first to a total nervous breakdown, then to alcoholism (R7).
The opposite fates of two microscopes, the electron and the "Universal", have ever since continued
to plague my mind, incessantly pricking it with a philosophical question: How was it that the first,
able to see only inert, inanimate matter was universally adopted in the world’s laboratories
while the second, able to view animate organism as they lived and breathed, went into universal
limbo?What did the triumphant success of the one, and the sad demise of the other, have to say about
the basic 20th century outlook in the biosciences supposedly dealing with life?
While asking that question, let us add a few more. What is it about the "politics of science" that
led two scientific titans - or three, if, by anticipation, we include our host, Gaston Naessens -
men who were self-trained experts in microscopy, and cancerology, to be brought to trial? How is it
that the discoveries of all three have been put on an "Index" as bogus and worthless? What explains
their being denounced, all three of them, as deceivers and charlatans in the United States, France
and many other countries? It would take a moment of silence to contemplate the answer to these
questions." (R8)
THIRD STEPS ON THE TRAIL: GASTON NAESSENS AND THE SOMATID From where it had first led to Reich,
thence to Rife, my trail next took me, surprisingly enough, to Rock Forest, a small village in that
portion of Quebec, just north of Vermont, that is called L’Estrie in French, and The Eastern
Townships in English.
I was tipped off to the existence of Gaston Naessens by Eva Reich
M.D., Wilhelm Reich’s daughter. Since part of the story of my initial meeting, and 12-year
association, with him has been told in the first chapter of my book, I shall not repeat it
here.What I can and should say, is that if my studies of Reich’s research had opened a
narrow vista onto the world of pleomorphic microbiology, and those of Reich’s work had
greatly widened it, then what I came to learn as result of my encounters with Naessens began to
afford me a view of the whole horizon beyond it.
My first visit to see Gaston Naessens was in 1979, ten years after a footlocker of Reich’s
writings had been handed to me by Peter Tompkins for study. During the next half decade I was to
learn, through my own experience, the help of friends and particularly through hundreds of hours
spent with Gaston Naessens and his wife, a great deal more about what he has discovered in his
fascinating research life than is reported in my book. And to learn about the many vicissitudes he
has gone through as a result.
As time went by, one of the main things that became most shockingly clear to me was the
unwillingness, or the inability of many scientifically trained people to accept or believe what they
were seeing through Naessens’ microscope.Instead of heralding the somatidic forms as
excitingly brand new, they simply wrote them off as artifact, something not naturally present but
introduced in error."
(R9).
A whole essay could be written about how such beliefs spring, within seconds, into the minds of so
called "competent" observers the most authoritarian of whom pass along as "certainties" to their
followers. All such observers - and they are the vast majority - have, if they have ever heard it,
forgotten Reich’s dictum for scientific work: "Do not automatically believe in anything ,
especially what you are told. Convince yourself of something by observing it with your own eyes.
And, after having perceived a new fact, do not loose site of it again until it is fully explained"
(emphasis added)If in this connection, it appears that the aphorism "seeing is believing" does not
necessarily hold true, one may add that the same is the case for the reverse: "believing is seeing".
During one trip to Europe with the Naessens’ in the mid 1980s, we were privileged to meet a
Swedish physician, Erik Enby MD. who had experience working with what I learned was one of the
earliest, and most talented, pioneers in the field of pleomorphic microbial research.This was a
German zoologist of whom we shall say more of in a few moments.
It was because of the language barrier - Enby’s spoken English was halting and
Enderlein’s publications were in German, a language I neither speak nor read - that I could
not subsequently penetrate that part of the terra incognita where the German scientist had laboured,
at least not until 1990.
The peaks in a mountain chain of discoveries made by Naessens have been reviewed in part one of my
book. In retrospect, given the whole "patchwork quilt" or other discoveries in this field made by a
small platoon of researches, I would say that his crowning find was to have traced the whole cycle
back to its origin, the tiny form he calls the somatid and to show how that form not only is all but
indestructible, but through experimentation, how it acts something like a "DNA precursor" (R10).
All this and more, raises the question as to whether Naessens, in addition to everything else he has
done, including the development of a promising approach for the alleviation of degenerative disease,
has not come as close as anyone to unravelling the skein within which lies hidden the very mystery
of the origins of life that has for so long continued to confound science, as it still continues to
confound it. I use the qualification "as close as" because the next twist in my trail was to
confront me with the realization that another French scientist of rare genius might have been
unravelling the same skein a century before Naessens began to take up the task
FOURTH STEPS ON THE TRAIL: BECHAMP AND THE MICROZYMAS It was in France, in 1984, that I met a
pharmacist, Marie Nonclerq, who after a life spent practising her profession, was spurred to write
an award winning doctoral dissertation under the title: Antoine Bichamp, 1816-1908: The Man and the
Scientist, and the Originality and Productivity of his Work’ (4).The disappearance of
Rife’s microscope, along with most of his research documentation, constituted what amounted to
a lost chapter in the history of microbiological science.
What Nonclercq had been able to dredge up from the annals seemed to be no less than a whole
lost book.
I had stumbled, again by happenstance, on a controversy involving a battle between two scientific
titans that had for so long been swept from memory that several generation of scientists knew
nothing about it. One of the adversaries was Béchamp, the other, his nemesis, the world-famous Louis
Pasteur whose name is inscribed on the lintels of research institutes all over the world. The
controversy centrally involved their opposing views about the genesis of microbe-fostered disease.
Through a physician in Brittany, Nonclercq came across a thick tome on the history of a medicine (5)
in which she read that, on his death bed, Louis Pasteur had declared: Claude Bernard war right...
the microbe is nothing, the terrain is everything."
In his recantation, the father of the theory - still enshrined as gospel - that the primordial role
in many diseases is played by germs invading the body from without, seemed to be submitting to
evidence that, in actual fact, that role is often played by the body’s internal environment,
its terrain, its "soil" if one wills, that, changing in nature due to various causes, fosters the
development of germs from within.What Pasteur omitted was that his confession had been based not on
single insightful statement by France’s leading physiologist, Bernard, but by Antoine Béchamp,
the man with whom he had been locked in struggle for decades.
Nonclercq’s painstaking digging into historical sources uncontestably proves that this battle
was won, not on the basis of scientific facts, but by Pasteur’s being able to overcome his
nemesis, a dedicated, but retiring, searcher with no flair for self-promotion, with his highly
developed skills in what today is called "public relations."If the justice of history prevails, the
Pasteurian victory will one day prove entirely pyrrhic, at least in terms of the staggering losses
suffered by medical science in having, for so long been constrained to follow the Pasteurian track.
Béchamp’s own trail of discoveries began when, attacking the problem of fermentation -
chemical reactions that split complex compounds into relatively simple substances - he isolated from
living organisms a series of "ferments" he called zymases (R11).Working with a class of organisms
called molds, fungoid growths that disintegrate organic matter, Béchamp saw them to be formed by a
collection of tiny "granulations" which, because of their connection to zymases, he called
microzymas, or "tiny ferments", lexical forerunner of Naessens’ somatids ("tiny bodies") (6).
Very importantly, for the purposes of this narrative, he also found that these granulations, under
certain conditions, evolved into single-celled bacteria and that, therefore "cells could no longer
be regarded as the basic units of life", there being something far smaller to replace them.
More than that, the microzymas were seemingly so indestructible that Béchamp could find them even in
limestone dating to a geologic period going back 60 million years during which the first mammals
appeared on Earth. And he was astonished that all his efforts to kill them proved fruitless. As he
was to write in his third masterwork, The Blood, "I am able to assert that the microzyma is at the
commencement of all organisation.
And, since microzymas in dead bacteria are also living, it follows that they are also the living end
of all organisations, living beings of a special category without analogue."(7).
Because microzymas appeared at the inception of the life process - for instance in an ovule that
became an egg - and were also to be found, fully active, in decaying life-forms, Béchamp, in a
biological parallel to Lavoisier’s chemical rule: "Nothing is lost, nothing is created ... all
is transformed," was to state: "Nothing is the prey of death.. all is the prey of life."This seems
to recall the old biblical phrase: "Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust..." On the final page of The
Blood, Béchamp was even more explicit:
"After death, it is essential that matter be restored to its primitive condition, for it has only
been lent for a time to the living organised being ... Living beings, filled with microzymas, carry
in themselves the elements essential for life, or for disease, for destruction and for death."
This variety of results need not surprise us for the processes are the same. Our cells - as can
constantly be observed - are being continuously destroyed by means of a fermentation very
analogous to that which follows death. If we penetrate into the heart of these phenomena we could
really say, were it not that the expression is a trifle offensive, that we are constantly
rotting!" (emphasis added).
FIFTH STEPS ON THE TRAIL: GUENTHER ENDERLEIN AND THE BACTERIAL LIFE CYCLE It was only in the 1990
that, a year after our sequel (R12) to The Secret Life of Plants came out, and 22 years after I
began studying Reich and the bions, I finally had access to the work of another researcher that made
the chain of mountain peaks on the horizon of pleomorphic microbial research stand out in clearer
historical detail. This access was provided by a book, the first in English on the subject, dealing
with the research begun during World War I by German zoologist, Guenther Enderlein, whose
discoveries were characterised by the book’s author as "some of the most important ever
made."Working as a bacteriologist in a military hospital on the Baltic Sea, Enderlein, in 1917,
finished a manuscript heralded by colleagues as "opening totally new observations of the microbe
world." It revealed many different pleomorphic development phases of bacteria and showed that
illnesses and their healing processes are bound to exact cyclical and morphological laws.
The manuscript was published as a book, Bakterien Cyclogenie, (The Life Cycle of Bacteria) in 1925,
shortly after its author’s appointment as curator of the Zoological Museum in Berlin.
For inspiring his work, Enderlein gives great credit to Antoine Béchamp as well as several Germans
who took up where Béchamp left off, including zoologist Robert Leuckart, founder of the science of
parisitology, and Otto Schmidt, who first reported parasites in the blood of cancer patients as far
back as 1901.
Given the focus of interest at this meeting on darkfield microscopy, it is of great interest to add
here that only by working at this instrument did Enderlein learn that micro-organisms go through a
forming-changing cycle that, in his view, could take on countless variations leading him to label
the phenomenon a "1000-headed monster."
He unequivocally asserted, while different types of micro-organisms normally live within the body in
a mutually beneficial symbiotic relationship, with severe deterioration of the body’s
environment they develop into disease-producing (!!) forms to create what he called dysbiosis, or "a
fault in the life process."Their action, said Enderlein, was not due to any perverse intent on the
microbes part to harm it, but to the their urge to survive at its expense! In their early
development phases they lived in the blood to perform functions beneficial to health, in the later
ones, they abandoned that role to assure their preservation.’
Since, today, Bakterien Cyclogenie has become virtually unknown, it is curious to note that, before
World War II, it brought the researcher a modicum of international recognition. It was apparently
well received at an international biological congress held in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1930, and
Enderlein’s contributions were recognised by his being honoured, in 1939, at the Third
Microbiological Congress held in New York City.
Despite personal attacks on him by powerful members of the orthodox German medical community,
Enderlein was strongly supported by a few courageous colleagues such as the physician and microbial
researcher,
Dr. Wilhelm von Brehmer, who identified as causal agent in the uncontrolled and malignant growth of
Cancerous cells."
Enby’s book also filled me in on historical aspects of how the doctrine that microbes were
monomorphic - as opposed to pleomorphic - had risen to ascendancy, aspects which I had missed while
researching my paper on Royal Raymond Rife.This rise can be attributed not only to the influence of
Pasteur (1822-1895), but also to that of Robert Koch (1843-1910), whose "principles" are one of the
"Ten Commandments" in microbial research, and his compatriot the naturalist and botanist, Ferdinand
Julius Cohn (1828-1898), who insisted upon the constancy of bacterial types and their Classification
into rigidly set groups and species based on their structure and form.
Entrenched as dogma, the Cohn-Koch view was taught to many Americans who went to Germany to study
medicine after the turn of the Century and who, in turn, brought it back to the United Stales where,
becoming the ruling outlook, it brooked no opposition.
IN LIEU OF A CONCLUSION: THE TRAIL WINDS AHEAD What I have presented to you is only an account of a
personal trek into the mysterious country inhabited by pleomorphic organisms. I gave it to you
"piecemeal" so that you could share the uncertainties and surprises met along the trail that are
normal to any exploration.
The country surveyed has been only superficially charted but, as a result of my exploration, my
knapsack is filled with a heap of sketches, that, given the time necessary to accomplish the task,
would one day allow me to prepare a map of the territory in all detail.
In book form, this map could easily provide a tale as exciting as any told in the best detective
thriller. All that is lacking is its ending, and the ending "devoutly to be wished" is that the
labours of so many stalwart workers in the field of microbial pleomorphic research will find their
fruits in the acceptance of their findings - and the applications of therapeutic modalities to which
these have led
- for the benefit of the sick and the suffering everywhere.
The first chapter of Dr. Enby’s book was entitled; "Origins of a Medical Revolution." That
revolution, still in progress is not over. Since Enderlein’s book came out 65 years ago, its
conclusions, like those of Béchamp before him, have continued to remain unacknowledged by the
scientific community as a whole. This is not because many other researchers have not bent every
effort to bring out the truth, to make the revolution happen. Consider, for instance that, way back
in 1927, an American microbiologist, Dr. Philip Hadley, who much admired Enderlein’s work,
published, in the Journal of Infectious Diseases, a 312 page article, "Microbic Dissociation", based
on work conducted at the Hygienic Laboratory of the University of Michigan. In this article, Hadley
foresightedly noted:
"It will probably be many years before a true appraisal of Enderlein’s contribution can be
made. In the meantime, we may regard with not little admiration his manifestly careful attempt to
put a degree of order into the chaotic state of the study of bacterial cells.
I believe that Enderlein has blazed a trail which, at least, in many lines of advance, other
bacteriologists sooner or later are sure to follow."Those words were written 64 years ago, but few
have been the bacteriologists to take up Hadley’s challenge.One who did take up that challenge
was born only three years before Hadley laid it down. We are in his presence today. In a life of
devotion and, isolation, half of it in his native France, the other half in Quebec, the land of his
adoption, he has kept alight, and borne forward, the torch lit and carried before him by Béchamp,
Enderlein, Rife, Reich and so many others.
Now he has emerged from cherished anonymity into the limelight at a symposium of his summoning to
which you have come, many of you from far away, to bear what he has to say and to see what he has to
show you. It maybe that his discoveries will determine whether the field of microbial pleomorphic
research will at last emerge onto scientific center-stage. Will that emergence soon happen"?
Is it "to be or not to be?" For that, as Hamlet put it in another context, is the question.
Let us salute Gaston Naessens and his triumphant accomplishments.
REFERENCES: RI The word ‘orthodox’, stems from Greek ortho . (meaning
‘correct’, or ‘right’, or even ‘upright’) mid doxa
(‘opinion), the latter coming from the verb, dokein (‘to think,’ or ‘to
seem’). Traced to its roots, orthodoxy thus connotes ‘opinions that seem, or are though
to be correct’
R2 Untranslatable into any other language, the word ‘maverick’ denotes one who refuses
to abide by the dictates of his group, in other words, a’dissenter’. Most people do not
know that its etymology comes straight out of the cowboy culture of the ‘Old West’ where
the term was applied to an unbranded, or orphan, range calf or foal traditionally considered the
property of the first person who brands it. The English speaking word is indebted to an early Texas
cattleman, Samuel a Maverick (1809-1810) who did not brand his calves, for involuntarily donating
his name to its lexicon.
R3 The world, and perhaps the only, expert on Reich’s bion research is Dr. Bernard Grad,
professor of biological sciences recently retired from McGill University in Montreal. In his student
days, Grad spent much time working with Reich at "Organon" the home and research laboratory Reich
bult in Rangeley, Maine. Grad has research, still awaiting publication, on his own bion research as
it relates to the origin of Life.
R4 Reich’s private archives were sealed by the sole trustee to his estate. His daughter, Eva,
tried unsuccessfully to unseal them through court action.
R5 Rife’s genius also invented a camera which could clearly reveal the letters and numbers of
an auto license plate from a mile away!
R6 The Diving Hand: The 500 Year Old Mystery of Dowsing (E.P. Dutton, New York, 1979; New Age
Publications, North Carolina, 1985.)
R7 It was only through a fortuitous meeting in Kansas City that I was finally led to the San Diego
garage of one of Rife’s lab assistants where I found the "Universal Microscope" in dilapidated
condition. The publication of my article resulted in many phone calls from people who had been on
the hunt for the microscope for years. One of the most interesting and ardent came from John Hubbard
MD., State University of New York (Buffalo), who came to my house in Washington
M.E. to look at documentation on Rife I had brought back from California. I had planned to write a
book on Rife’s life and work, but other projects intervened. That book, The Cancer Cure
that Worked, (Marcus Books, Queensville, Ontario, 1987) was written by Barry Lynes.
R8 For enlightening answers to these questions, see The Cancer Industry Unravelling the Politics, by
Ralph W.Moss (Paragon House, New York, 1989).
R9 The word "artifact" stems from art, plus factum (the neuter past participle of the verb facere,
"to make"), or "something made". In biology, it means "a structure or substance not normally present
but produced by some external agency or action." Most of us have forgotten that the basic meaning of
the word, art, is "human effort to supplement, imitate, alter or counterfeit the work of nature."
The facile use of the word, "artifact," in addition to being able unjustly to dispose of new
microscopic discoveries, has a kind of "overtone" suggesting an attempt to trick, feign, dissemble
or to carry out a deception or engage in a fraudulent action. It fits well with accusations against
Naessens of having done all those things over the yeas.
R10 His experiments on rabbit-to-rabbit somatid transfer as they apply to genetic characteristic
change in living animals, and particularly to organ transplant with potentially no "rejection
syndrome", are described in part 1 of my book.
R11 Enzyme complexes found in yeasts, bacteria and higher plants. Credit for their discovery went,
not to Bechamp, but to a German scientist who was awarded the Nobel Prize in 1907 for making it.
Béchamp’s conclusive paper, justifying his priority, was published in 1897 and the word zymase
is found in the 1873 edition of the French Littre dictionary in connection with Bechamp’s
first work on the subject.R12 Secrets of the Soil, Harpercollins, New York, 1980.
1. Reich’s first book on this, written in German, was Die Bione (The Bions) published in
Norway in 1939. English language treatment of the subject is to be found in The Cancer Biopathy,
(first published in the 1950’s) 1973; and The Bion Experiments on the Origin of Life,
1979, both published by Farrar, Straus, Giroux.
2. "The New Microscopes"
3. "What Has Become of the Rife Microscope?" New Age Journal, Boston, Massachusetts, 197(r, also
reprinted in The Persecution and Trial of Gaston Naesens, NJ. Kramer inc,Tiburon, California,
1991, as Appendix "A".
4. Published as a book: Antoine Bechamp, 1816-1908 L’Homme et le Savant, Originalite et
Fecondite de Son Oeuvre, Maloine, Paris, 1982.
5. Delhoume, Leon, De Claude Bernard a d’Arsonval. Lib Bailliere et fils, Paris, 1939, 595pp~
6. Béchamp’s two master works on this subject seer Les Microzymas, Blilliere, Paris, 1883,
992pages; and Microzymas et Microbes, Editions Dentu, Paris, 1893, 346 pages.
7. From Le Sang et son deme element anatomique, Paris 1899, translated as The Blood and the Third
Anatomical Element by Montague R. Leverson MD., John Ouseley Limited, London 1912. In the
1980’s Alan Cantwell, M.D. reported that the Library of Congress in Washington D.C. had
informed him that the book was to be found neither in its collection nor in any library in the
United States. It has since been reprinted by Veritas Press, GPO Box 1653, Bundaberg, QId 1988.
8. Hidden Killers: The Revolutionary Medical Discoveries of Professor Gunther Enderlein, by Erik
Enby MD., Sheehan Communications, 1990. The book may be obtained from raum&zeit, Box 1508, Mount
Vernon, Washington D.C. 98273; Pb: 2064246025.
9. Enderlein who like Bechamp, lived for 96 years (he died in 1968), published many of his
conclusions in Akmon – a journal he first issued in 1955.
10. In his book, Siphonospora polymorpha von Brehmer 1947, this researcher also noted that cancer
can be prediagnosed in its earliest forms by measuring the pH value of the blood and the
appearance in it of large amounts of rod-shaped siphonospora, as viewable under a dark-field
microscope.
raum&zeit, VoLZ No.6,1991. Pages 52 to 59. (raum&zelt is an excellent bi-monthly journal published
in the USA. Subscriptions are US$75- for six issues: Dept. S.O.,PO Box 1508, Mount Vernon,
Washington 98273.
(11)424 6034 - Editor’s Office